A blast from the past that has not lost its relevance, and that comes back to me again and again.

I did love Michael Scriven’s analysis in his 2013 keynote to the Australasian Evaluation Society in Brisbane, where he remarked that the academic theorists are always considered the high priests of any discipline; the pure

What’s fundamentally missing from most evaluation work, but absolutely makes or breaks the quality and value of what we do?

Find out from this fun and informative podcast. Michael Scriven and Jane Davidson talk about evaluation-specific methodology and why it’s so critically important. A sneak preview of their workshops in Dublin (at EES) and Denver

“Guys, you all got on a train and you didn’t check the destination. You just checked the question of what it was first going to get to, which was program eval, and then there were little hamlets along the way, like personnel eval and so on. But actually, this train is going to follow what the definition of evaluation is in the dictionary because that’s what it chose to call itself. And I have news for you. It’s got some pretty remarkable places where it’s going to stop and you are going to have to show your pass. …”

Michael Scriven was in fine form today, keynoting at the Australasian Evaluation Society conference in Brisbane, Australia. So hilarious it may have looked like a bit of fun to some, but this is deadly serious, change-the-world stuff!

Right now, he says, the elite “inner circle” in the social sciences are the people working on theory

Getting the definition of evaluation right is not simply a matter of having a popularity vote about it.

The fact that so many don’t see a clear difference between evaluation and other pursuits (such as research, monitoring, audit, organization development, management consulting) doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.